Bull market for e-business platform

User stories from the knowledge front

As one of Germany’s largest investment firms, Union Investment decided to stake some of its money on a more flexible IT infrastructure--one that could accommodate both old and new systems across multiple locations.

Data exchange between the different IT systems at Union Investment offices in Frankfurt, Luxembourg, Zurich, Milan, Madrid, Tokyo, Budapest and Warsaw, was being handled by a custom interface program. However, the system lacked the flexibility to manage reorganizations and changes in software components. So the company turned to a enterprise application integration solution, called BusinessWare, from Vitria Technology.

The e-business platform now serves as the starting point for the integration of margin calculation, securities management and fund bookkeeping systems with the existing IT infrastructure. In addition to unifying data and applications, the software integrates at the business process level. The most important internal business processes, as well as transactions with institutional partners and customers, are graphically modeled and automated. That location-independent automation of business processes enables users to control the flow of information according to actual business conditions and to forward data to the appropriate IT systems.

Future plans include using the software throughout the company. BusinessWare runs on four Sun E10000 servers linked together into high-availability (HA) clusters. Within each HA cluster, two servers are linked to ensure fail-safe operations. If one of the clusters is disabled, the other can immediately take over its workload.

The company chose the solution because it provides data integration, business process management and real-time analysis within a unified architecture, according to Axel Erhardt, project manager at Union Investment in Frankfurt/Main. “Furthermore, the e-business platform offers excellent performance in handling high volumes of data with scalability and reliability,” says Erhardt